Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Online Comparison

Both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online are cloud-based accounting software packages that cater to a variety of industries. They both have robust feature sets with hundreds of integrations to streamline your business processes. While QuickBooks is the better choice for those who want to send estimates to customers and track their mileage with GPS, Sage Intacct has customer relationship management (CRM) and collaboration tools that will create a virtual paper trail of your transactions.

When to Use Sage Intacct

Sage Intaccct is cloud-based accounting software that can be customized to meet your accounting needs. It has six overarching modules as part of its software, and you can select the ones you need as part of your plan. These include core financials, dashboards, and reporting, billing, budgeting and planning, integrating with other platforms, and advanced functionality for an additional cost.

The software is ideal for businesses with multiple entities like holding companies because the dashboard allows you to view instant metrics across the board. With the ability to create custom dashboards for departments like accounts payable (A/P) or roles like CEO, it ensures that information flows seamlessly through all channels. Sage Intacct is also good for businesses with international locations as it can handle multiple currencies and consolidate data to a single base currency for consistent analysis.

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Not sure if Sage Intacct is for you? Check out our review of the best alternatives to QuickBooks.

When to Use QuickBooks

We selected QuickBooks Online as the best overall accounting software and for good reasons, such as the ability to track time and send estimates. It also has strong reporting and inventory tracking capabilities, and more than 650 integrations. Additionally, Quickbooks Online offers integrated payroll and time tracking, which is great for businesses that don’t want to use a third-party integration service.

QuickBooks also excels with its ability to brand forms, such as adding a logo to your invoice. Businesses that frequently work on the road will find that the mobile app allows for many of the same features that the software has, such as invoicing customers and tracking mileage with GPS. Businesses that track activity by class and location, such as property management firms, will find this feature useful.

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Compare Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online at a Glance

Sage Intacct Pricing vs QuickBooks Online Pricing

It is difficult to compare software pricing because Sage Intacct offers custom quotes based on the needs of your business while QuickBooks has five subscription plans available. Both offer a free 30-day trial or a free product demo.

Sage Intacct Pricing

Unlike many other accounting software platforms that are priced on a standard monthly or annual subscription basis, Sage Intacct’s pricing is quote-based. This means there is no standard Sage Intacct cost, and instead pricing is customized based on your business. To find out how much it would cost your business to use the software, you will need to contact its sales team and work with them directly. It does offer a free 30-day trial so that you can try it out before committing.

QuickBooks Pricing

QuickBooks Online offers five subscription plans which range in price from $15 to $150 per month and are based on the number of users and available features. There is currently an offer of a free 30-day trial or 50% off for the first three months. The prices for each are below:

• Self-Employed: $15 per month for one user
• Simple Start: $25 per month for one user
• Essentials: $40 per month for up to three users
• Plus: $70 per month for up to five users
• Advanced: $150 per month for up to 25 users

QuickBooks Self-Employed cannot be upgraded to any other plan, so before choosing it be sure it will provide all the features you need for the foreseeable future.

QuickBooks Pricing and Tiered Features

Takeaway: Because Sage Intacct’s pricing is quoted based on the size of your business and the products and modules that you need, it is not readily available. The pricing plans for QuickBooks Online are much more transparent, with five plans available depending on the functions that you need to access.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks: Features

Sage Intacct makes it simple to create real-time dashboards across one or more entities without the need to export it to Excel. The dashboards can combine both financial and operational data, and with Sage Intacct’s built-in dimensions you can analyze your data, drilling down to source transactions. However, this level of detail can be overwhelming to novice users. For all of Sage Intacct’s benefits, it cannot send estimates to customers, sales orders to vendors, and to track time and mileage. But it does have strong collaboration tools, an ability to view customer history, and to handle multiple entities—features that QuickBooks Online lacks.

QuickBooks Online excels with its strong customization features, which allow you to brand your forms and customize categories. It also can perform job costing. For those businesses with employees, you can generate W-2 forms. But QuickBooks does lack the ability to convert currency within reports and to defer billing. It also cannot handle order management or processing.

Takeaway: If you’re looking for accounting software that can be customized to your business and cost is not a factor, consider checking out Sage Intacct. While it offers a comprehensive solution to your business needs, QuickBooks Online can also be a viable option if you’re willing to overlook its lack of collaboration tools.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Online: Ease of Use

QuickBooks Online is easy to set up and use, whereas there is a steep learning curve for Sage Intacct’s software. Each Sage Intacct user will have a custom dashboard based on their role in the company, but QuickBooks Online users all see the same dashboard. While QuickBooks Online allows for more advanced tasks like tracking inventory, it lacks the collaboration tools that Sage Intacct offers.

Sage Intacct Ease of Use

Compared to QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct’s user interface is not that user-friendly and can be overwhelming for beginners. Its advanced user interface is called Action UI, and it offers tools for A/P, bank reconciliations, and creating custom reports:

Shown above is a CFO dashboard, which includes reports that are unique to the business. This includes quarterly revenue by channel, 3-year revenue trend, revenue by segment trend, weekly cash balances, and salary and wages by department. This allows the CFO to obtain a comprehensive glimpse at the different aspects of the business:

There is also a front-to-back office compliance tool which allows you to collaborate on decisions and document them in the context of the financial documents they relate to. In the future, you can replace recollections and speculation with a documented decision and audit trail.

QuickBooks Ease of Use

QuickBooks Online is very user-friendly, with a dashboard that allows access to many key features such as your account balances, income and expense totals, and comprehensive charts. There is also a navigation bar on the left that will take you to each section:

1. Left navigation bar: This section has shortcuts to different aspects of your business, including Transactions, Expenses, Sales, Cash Flow, Projects, Payroll, Reports, Taxes, Mileage, Accounting, My Accountant, Capital, Apps, and Live Bookkeeping. Payroll and Live Bookkeeping are add-on services for an additional fee.
2. Cash Flow: Customizable by time period, this report shows you your income, cost of goods sold, and expenses.
3. Income: All income-related items, such as paid invoices, are shown here. This information allows you to follow up on overdue invoices and view your A/R report.
4. Expenses: Your expenses, broken down by category, are shown here.
5. Profit and Loss: Your profit and loss (P&L) statement can be generated here.
6. Sales: View a customizable graph of sales generated during a specified time period.
7. Bank Accounts: Connect your bank and credit card accounts to QuickBooks Online, and you will be able to access both your bank and QuickBooks balances.

Takeaway: QuickBooks Online’s dashboard is much more user-friendly than Sage Intacct, which is not well-suited for novice users. The Sage Intacct dashboard is much more complex while QuickBooks Online’s is clean and uncluttered, providing you with key financial data. However, it doesn’t offer collaboration tools like Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Online: Assisted Bookkeeping

Sage Intacct Assisted Bookkeeping

Sage Intacct does not have a dedicated bookkeeping service available, but we recommend that you take advantage of its partnership with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and CPA.com to select from the best outsourced financial pros for your business

QuickBooks Assisted Bookkeeping

QuickBooks Online offers assisted bookkeeping in the form of QuickBooks Live, which assigns you to a virtual bookkeeper. The services that QuickBooks Live provides include monthly reports that allow you to monitor the financial health of your business. Your bookkeeper will first bring your books up-to-date and then work with you to tackle your ongoing work. However, this doesn’t include day-to-day bookkeeping tasks like paying bills, invoicing, A/P, and accounts receivable (A/R). But it does allow for both cash and accrual accounting.

If your issue is a bit more complex, you might want to consider consulting with someone from Intuit’s expansive network of QuickBooks Pro Advisors.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Online: Integrations

Sage Intacct integrates with over 200 business apps, while QuickBooks Online integrates with triple the amount at more than 650 currently available. They both offer a variety of solutions, including A/R and inventory management.

Sage Intacct Integrations

Sage Intacct offers the ability to connect to any applications you have, whether they are proprietary custom applications or widely-used business systems like Salesforce CRM. You can do this by accessing prebuilt connections that are available through the Sage Intacct Marketplace. Here’s a sample of available integrations:

• A/R: BlueSnap, Versapay, Lockstep, and Paystand
• CRM: Impexium, Armanino, IntegratorPlus, and Gumu
• Expenses: Nexonia Expenses, Emburse Tallie, and Beanworks
• Inventory management: QStock Inventory, ScanForce, SalesPad, and MarketMan
• Payroll: APS, Paychex, ADP, and Proliant
• Time tracking: BigTime, Sage Intelligent Time, and Criterion

QuickBooks Integrations

QuickBooks Online currently integrates with more than 650 popular business apps, including two that can be accessed directly within the app, QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Time.

• QuickBooks Payroll: Full payroll functionality is available by clicking on QuickBooks Payroll. This includes integrated payroll, taxes, human resources, health benefits, workers’ compensation, and more.
• QuickBooks Time: Track time with the mobile app and then bill it to customers or use it for payroll within QuickBooks Online. Among Time’s advanced features are GPS tracking of employees and time clock terminals with facial recognition.

Here’s a sample of key third-party QuickBooks integrations:

• A/R: Bill.com, Melio, Veem, Lightyear, and Beanworks
• CRM: HubSpot, Capsule CRM, Method:CRM, and MessageDesk
• Expenses: Expensify, Checkflo, Pluto, and Corpay One
• Inventory management: SOS Inventory, Connex, Katana Inventory and Manufacturing, and Order Time Inventory
• Payroll: RUN Powered by ADP, Gusto, Payroll by Patriot Software, Square Payroll, and Justworks
• Time Tracking: Time Tracker by eBillity, BigTime, Hour Timesheet, TimeRewards, and Homebase

Takeaway: If you’re looking for accounting software with as many integration options as possible, QuickBooks Online is the better choice. The main distinction between the two is that QuickBooks Online has two apps that can be accessed directly within the software, QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Online.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Online: Mobile App

QuickBooks Online is a good option for businesses that do much of their work remotely as its app has many timesaving features, such as invoicing customers and accepting payments. The app is also good for tracking mileage, allowing you to add the expense to invoices. Other than accessing Sage Intacct through the web browser, it doesn’t have a mobile app.

Sage Intacct Mobile App

There is not currently a mobile app available for Sage Intacct. However, because the software is cloud-based, you can still access it via the web browser on your favorite device.

QuickBooks Mobile App

Available for both Android and iOS devices, the QuickBooks mobile app gives you an overview of your business activity and allows you to accomplish multiple accounting tasks wherever you are. You can view dashboard data, create and send invoices, accept payments, capture receipts and attach them to expenses, reconcile transactions, view customer information, and message customers from the app. You can also track your mileage using GPS, which you can categorize as business or personal.

Takeaway: While QuickBooks has a robust mobile app with many useful features, a mobile app for Sage Intacct doesn’t currently exist.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks: Customer Support

Both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online offer a variety of ways to receive support. However, while QuickBooks does not charge for its basic telephone and email support, Sage Intacct offers telephone support in the form of paid plans. Live chat is also not an option available with Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct Customer Support

Sage Intacct has a Help Center, which covers how to use its features and functions. You can also visit the Sage Intacct Community, which is available 24/7 and allows you to submit a support case, keep tabs on the status of your open cases, and visit the knowledge base for articles on common issues and troubleshooting solutions.

Sage Intacct also offers premium support plans at four levels: Essentials, Bronze, Silver, and Gold. This gives you unlimited access to phone support and enables you to quickly obtain answers related to product features.

QuickBooks Customer Support

There are many ways to obtain support for QuickBooks Online, which include the following:

• Telephone support: While phone support is available, it is not possible to call QuickBooks Online directly. You must submit a request for them to call you.
• Email support: Email is another option available if your issue is less time-sensitive.
• Live chat support: If you’re not able to find what you’re looking for, you can contact the support team by clicking on the “Contact us” button at the bottom of the help window. However, this option is not available 24/7.
• Searchable knowledge base: This includes help pages, videos, webinars, and paid courses.
• User community: Post a question in the community forum and receive feedback from other users who may be able to help you troubleshoot the issue.

Takeaway: Neither Sage Intacct nor QuickBooks Online offer the option for free direct phone support, but there are paid plans available for Sage Intacct. QuickBooks Online allows phone support after you fill out an online form with your issue.

Bottom Line

Sage Intacct bills itself as the number one choice for organizations outgrowing QuickBooks. It helps chief financial officers (CFOs) and businesses with multiple entities access integrated management and financial reports across their business entities and delivers automation and controls around billing, accounting, and reporting to reduce errors, stay audit-ready, and scale the business. While QuickBooks Online offers many of the same features, it lacks Sage Intacct’s complexity and collaboration tools.